"Don't Forget Your GoPro"

As I reclined in my friend's boat under a warm July morning sun, I marveled at Lake Michigan's near complete stillness, and total abscence of cloud in the sky. My friend, waterskis submerged in the water, hunched over a small camera, and banged on the deck with a fist as he struggled to get the Go Pro camera to work. "I'm heading in" he said, "if it doesn't record for me this time. I'm sick of this."

The GoPro, a small gray camera enclosed in nearly indestructible plastic armor, is intended for filming one's point of view, and can be combined with an array of mounts and straps that can attach the camera to anything from a forehead, to a mountain bike, to the tip of a snowboard. As Nick Paumgarten explains in his article about the GoPro, "We are a Camera", featured in The New Yorker, the founder of GoPro, Nick Woodman, took his invention, originally intended to help film himself surf, and, with the help of the era of technology and social media, turned it into a company, valued at three billion dollars at its initial public offering. 

The GoPro has made it easy to film both adventure and everyday activities in ways that were once very difficult to do. GoPro has created a link between  filming and social media. ". . . the GoPro name [has] become shorthand not only for all P.O.V. cameras. . . but for the genre of short video that has arguably become as much a feature of daily life as the three minute pop song", says Paumgarten. The camera, with its skyrocketing popularity, has grown from a cool gadget to something notably damaging to people's behaviors.

The capabilities of the GoPro has negatively changed the way people take part in activities, causing 

them to take risks and obssess over getting the best shots for film. As Paumgarten explains in his article, pro mountain biker, Aaron Chase, described riding his bike among a herd of elk in the Smoky mountains as "hell" all because he was unable to get his camera to film it. I would describe it as a once in a lifetime experience. Unfortunately for Aaron Chase, this experience will be remembered something he failed to capture. 

Unfortunately, this negative attitude towards enjoyable experiences has not limited itself to those using the GoPro as part of their career ( i.e. many extreme sport athletes now). I see in my life, people ranging from distant acquantainces to close friends, focusing activities around capturing a shot on film, photograph or video. As my friend expressed that one morning we went boating, there wasn't really much of a point to us jetskiing any longer if he could not get it on his GoPro. The appeal of jetskiing is not gone just because of this camera, however, in the eyes of my friend, the experience surely was not complete. The goal of the outing was not just to enjoy ourselves this time, it was to let others know what we were doing and that we were enjoying ourselves.

This new goal in life is not just the result of the GoPro camera. I have witnessed similar effects with Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, and I am sure I am missing others. These sites and apps have all caused people at my school and in my community to stress over their "appearance" on these apps. They must maintain a certain status or something like that. The GoPro is simply a piece of hardware, the only piece that I can think of for that matter, that is enabling or moving forward the transition to a social media oriented world. Maybe the GoPro is the first of social media hardwares, or the last, but it is certainly taken away from the joys of jetskiing.